 May 40 here, so I want to talk about the evolution of the Republican Party into the particle of the worker, the party of the people, the party of populism. So it used to be that we would associate populism with the left. It used to be in the formulation of liberal democracy that it was the Republicans who were primarily concerned with preserving classical liberal rights to things like property. And people on the left, they were more concerned with ever-increasing amounts of democracy so that people could, for example, vote themselves more extensive welfare benefits, vote themselves a much bigger share of the richest assets. But now, now at the age of Trump, the Republicans have become the working-class party of the party of populism. And this movement really began in the 1960s with Richard Nixon, his Southern strategy, and it's now often the left who are more of the party of the elites. So thinking about two of our leading thinkers on the right these days, Ken Wood, what's his name? Kenneth Deepleaf Jerkel, just suddenly blanked on his name. And Richard Spencer, these are two people who are very suspicious of populism. They don't like nationalism, and they don't really want the people to rule. They want experts to rule. And that's quite out of touch with the rest of the American right. The rest of the American right is overwhelmingly popular. Tucker Carlson to Darren Beatty to Paul Godfrey, Joseph Cotto, Vidaire, American Renaissance, Claremont, American Greatness, Michael Anton, Nick Fuentes, the America First movement, the Donald Trump movement, the MAGA movement. These people are populist, meaning they believe that virtue lies with the people and that if you give the people a voice that they will, more often than not, choose policies that are for the best of the country. So I am myself neither populist nor anti-populist, neither an elitist nor anti-elitist. I believe sometimes the elites are right and the populists are wrong. Sometimes the populists are right and the elites are wrong. So for example, I generally side with the populist attitude towards immigration restriction and the populist attitude towards prioritizing our own national trade interests as opposed to free trade and big corporate interests. Kenneth Brown, thank you. Thank you so much, Glib Medley. Man, if I ever have money, Glib Medley, I'm going to hire you to produce my show. So conservatism has always had a skeptical perspective on mass democracy. Conservatives from the time of Edmund Burke, the end of the 18th century, have had a great fear of things like the French Revolution, fear of mob rule, fear of demagogues like Huey Long in the 1930s, rallying the masses to destroy a fragile social order. This is a common theme in many right-wing schools of thought. Notes rust doubt that in February 2, 2022 column here. And this has long showed up among traditionalist defenders of aristocracy and libertarians alike. So Ken Brown, Richard Spencer, these people believe much more in aristocracy than in democracy. They believe in elite rule rather than nationalism and populism. And then there are two specifically American forms of conservative anxiety about democracy. There's a great fear of corrupt urban machine politics, in particular two types of corrupt urban machine politics, Roman Catholic, corrupt urban machine politics, Tammany Hall and Black urban politics. So conservative skepticism about mass democracy, that's been around and dominant for about 250 years. Also Republicans in America have long feared voter fraud and non-citizen voting. And fear that demographic change through large amounts of immigration could deliver permanent democratic party rule. So Republicans have long been far more likely than Democrats to portray America as a republic, meaning that we've got these individual rights, not a democracy, and to strongly defend our system's counter-majoritarian mechanisms. Well, like you think, like Kenneth Brown, he talks very much about the virtues of minority rule. And you can also say that this is self-interested because Republicans tend to lose the popular vote. And so mechanisms such as the Senate and the Electoral College, these counter-majoritarian mechanisms, tend to advantage Republicans. Now, things get complicated because the modern Republican party is heir to an ever-increasingly strong pro-democracy. And you had COVID shutdowns and lockdowns and restrictions. It was Republicans far more than Democrats who would protest. And the Republican argument was that the people weren't consulted, that these restrictions are being imposed on the people, destroying their rights, it's ruled by experts, unelected experts. So generally speaking, the left overwhelmingly believes in rule by experts rather than popular rule. Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon won a crushing presidential-level majorities. But then in their way, conservatives felt themselves constantly restricted and defeated by unelected powers such as bureaucrats and judges. So the right has become deeply invested in the idea that it represents the true American majority, the moral majority, the silent majority. While liberalism stands for elite rule, anti-demographic, anti-democratic forms of government, the bureaucracy, the deep state, the juristocracy, and the Ivy League. So with every new age of grassroots activism from the Tea Party to the local education revolts of today, the right now consistently casts itself as the small D Democrats. Now you've been very good listening to my rumblings on these cognitive issues. You get some hate porn here from Tucker Carlson. Good evening and welcome to Tucker Carlson. Tonight there is nothing in the world worse than finding out that your deepest fears are justified. That's the nightmare scenario, learning there really is a zombie in the closet. Let's say you're a kid and you've convinced yourself that your parents don't really love you. They claim they do. They say it all the time, usually without looking up from their iPhones, but you can tell they don't seem sincere. And then one Christmas morning confirmation, you discover they've forgotten to buy you presents, any presents. They were busy and just slipped their mind. Instead they've spent all their time and all their money buying gifts for a kid down the street. So all the things that you asked for, they gave to another nine year old you have never met. How'd that make you feel? Well you'd be crushed, but you would also be vindicated. You would know for a dead certain fact that your parents really didn't love you. They're not even very interested in you. That's how a lot of Americans felt last night, watching the House of Representatives approve yet another massive aid package for Ukraine. Nothing against Ukraine, but we could probably use that money here right about now. After a hundred years of virtually uninterrupted generation, the American economy appears to be faltering in ways that are scary to anyone who's paying attention. Even people who aren't paying attention can sense there's something really wrong. Lots of people are not working. Those who are working are getting poor quickly thanks to inflation. All of a sudden everything is wildly more expensive. Have you noticed? We literally have a shortage of baby formula right now. Did you think that would happen in America ever? And yet it is happening and so is the deadliest drug epidemic in our history. About 107,000 of your fellow Americans, most of them young people who should have had long, productive lives, are instead dead. They have died from drug ODS over the past year. This is the saddest thing that has happened in our country in a very long time. Okay, so Tucker Carlson is a particularly eloquent exponent of the populist perspective. So press one in the chat if you want more populism. Press two if you want more rule by elites. And press three if you want less democracy. So I've been reading this terrific book by Stephen Turner, The Politics of Expertise that came out in 2013. And he talks about at the beginning the rise of science education. And from a skeptical perspective, some program of extensive public science education is really form of state propaganda for just a faction of the experts, the scientific experts. And thus it's a violation of the basic neutrality of the state of the impartiality that liberal state is supposed to exhibit in the face of rival opinions to ensure the possibility of a genuine, fair and open discussion. So if the liberal state, meaning the classical liberal state, meaning that we're born with certain inalienable rights is supposed to be neutral with respect to opinions to neither promote or give any special regard to any particular set of beliefs, worldviews, sectarian positions, religious positions and so on. Well, what about expert positions? Why do they get some sort of special properties that other opinions lack? Why should the state give them a special consideration such as through subsidizing science or by treating expert opinions about environmental damage differently than the opinions of landowners or polluters? Why do the experts get special status? The special status granted to religious opinion leads to exclusion, its exclusion from the domain of state action. Religion is not supposed to be an acceptable subject of state action. It gets a protected status of limited autonomy in exchange for essentially renouncing politics. So you're not supposed to explicitly campaign for politics in a church or a synagogue. So this separate and neutral status of religion is often being proposed as the model for our state's relationship to science. But this is a peculiar analogy because the state not only protects science and subsidizes science and attends to the opinions of the society to separate the two religion and state delegate to the church's authority only over special topics. But with science and more generally with expert opinion, it's the opinions themselves that are treated as neutral. So is creation science really science? Well, not according to the state. There are no convincing answers in principle. There are no principles on which to rely that cannot themselves be attacked as ideological. Research on the genetic background of criminals that has been denounced as racist and government agencies have been intimidated into withdrawing support. So studies of race, whoa, studies of race and intelligence have been attacked as inherently racist and non-neutral. So supposedly, according to Newsweek, theories of intelligence tests to measure intelligence and social structures in which intelligence test predictions come true are all developed and controlled by wealthy white males for their own benefit. So this idea that science itself with its own mania for quantification prediction and control is merely an intellectual manifestation of racism and sexism is inherently non-neutral. This is treated in feminist theory as a given. So if the liberal state is supposed to be ideologically neutral, how is it to decide what is and what is not ideology as distinct from science? So when you can quantify, say, genetic studies and intelligent studies, when you can predict based on these studies, surely that is science. And if it's not science, how is it not science? It both has explanatory and predictive power, but that's science that we just dismiss as being illegitimate. So why is some science privileged? Why is some science regarded as sacred and other science is unacceptable? And yet Congress, which claims to run the country, can't be bothered even to acknowledge it, much less do anything about it. Instead, your representatives in Washington just voted to send yet another $40 billion to the Ukrainian oligarchs who paid off the president's son. That's what happened, and it's just the latest check that Congress has cut them. You can add it to the approximately $14 billion they've already spent on Ukraine. That brings the total as of tonight to more than $54 billion. How much is that? Well, for perspective, it is more than we spent per year on average on the war in Afghanistan, a war that began with a direct attack on the United States. $54 billion, that's about as much as Russia, the country, spends on its entire armed forces over the course of a full year. It is a ludicrous amount, and yet Congress happily approved it. In fact, they allocated $7 billion more than Joe Biden asked for. That's how excited they were to do it. Okay, press five if you want less money for Ukraine. Press six if you want more money for Ukraine. Back to Steven Turner on the politics of expertise. So if experts are the source of our knowledge about all sorts of things, and if this knowledge is not in and of itself essentially superior to our unaided opinion, which is not a genuinely expert, then the public itself is presently not just less competent than the experts, but it is essentially under the cultural and intellectual control of the experts. So a person exposed to an expert representation of human evolution at a natural history museum, according to one study, that person sees the more advanced people have features that resemble modern Europeans, and then that person as a consequence becomes a racist and a sexist. So according to Karl Schmidt, religion is a product of the lessons of early modern Europe's wars of religion, of the 17th century wars of religion, in particular 30 years war in Germany. So liberal politics developed as a consequence of the religious wars by taking the realm of religion and trying to set it outside of the political. So the domain of the political was reduced to the domain of opinions about which people could agree to disagree to tolerate and to accept the results of parliamentary debate and voting in the face of this disagreement. It was understood that some matters, such as matters of fact, would not be subject to debate, but these matters were the common possession of all sides in the course of public discussion. And this would only work, however, within a homogeneous nation. So Schmidt argues that parliamentary democracy depends on the possibility persuading one's opponents through argument of the truth or justice, or to allow oneself to be persuaded that something is true or just. But that's really only going to work if you have a homogeneous society. Everyone recognizes that they're experts. Wow, having some problem getting muted. And then there are those experts for whom there's a faction that recognizes their expertise. It's not wild, wildly and widely acclaimed. It's just a faction. Then there are groups like economists, right? Their claims to authority are not always accepted. Economists do agree amongst themselves to a great extent and what constitutes basic competence and competent analysis. So there is a community of opinion among economists, people who aren't members of this community, people who are just members of the public, they accept the community's claims to expertise. But the economics disciplines claim to authority, right? Claims that would enable any economist to speak for economics on elementary issues such as the benefits of free trade, right? These claims are fragile, right? You see an ad in the New York Times signed by hundreds of economists and these economists are claiming to speak representatively for economics. Well, you're not necessarily going to be persuaded by that. So an economics agreement on the basics is nothing like the agreement, say, in physics. It has to be demonstrated by the ancient collective ritual of signing a petition. And even many of the economists near unanimous claims not accepted as true, right? There are all sorts of members of a skeptical public who will contest them. And around every core of expert knowledge, there is a domain in which there is a core competence which is regarded as helpful but not definitive where competent experts may disagree. So establishing cognitive authority to a general audience is not easy. Major achievements like nuclear weapons, antibiotics, new chemicals and new technology are the coin of the realm. Policy directives by contrast really have the clarity of these achievements and policy failures really is particularly clear. So we have many different types of experts, those who are widely acclaimed, those who are simply acclaimed within a particular sphere. There are foreign policy experts, but a foreign policy expert is not an expert in the same way that a physicist or a biologist is an expert. No foreign policy expert is expected to demonstrate the validity of his views on foreign policy by producing an unambiguous record of success. Anything akin to curing cancer or constructing atomic weaponry. So when it comes to foreign policy, opinions based on secret information tend to gain a certain prestige. And foreign policy analysts and people like you and me do not have access to this secret information. Well, we don't have the prestige that those who have access to the secret secret information do. Now here's a conflict between democracy and expert opinion, right? Because the experts are supposed to possess this secret information. But with respect to foreign policy in practice, the foreign policy experts don't have an enviable track record. So foreign policy expertise, pretty similar to the expertise of theologians. Not necessarily packing a real world punch. So where's this money going? Oh, that's the best part. Congress has decided to fix all of the pressing problems that need to be fixed, except fix them in Ukraine, not here. So the main course of all of this funding from day one has been to secure Ukraine's borders because, you know, you can't have a country without borders. They have to be secure. Nancy Pelosi strongly believes that about Ukraine and so do her friends on the Republican side. So Ukrainian border security is the main goal. Then there's a problem of, quote, food insecurity, not here in Ukraine. Food's getting expensive in Ukraine. So we're going to spend $760 million to fix that just in this check and not just in Ukraine. Congress. Food insecurity is the gayest term. I've never seen someone starving in America. Their stomach bulging like those kids in Africa. I mean, food insecurity. That's whipped up by activists to make us feel like there are tens of millions of our fellow Americans who are food insecure. I mean, have you heard a gayer term than food insecurity? And our government needs to do something about food insecurity and emotional insecurity and say, sexual insecurity. You're feeling insecure. You might not get the sex that you need. Well, surely the government should be doing something about that. So the expert who is a threat is the expert who exerts influence through the back door. The expert who is a threat to democracy is one that you don't know about. An expert who exerts influence through the back door who validates the confidence of professionals whose advice is regarded as authoritative by other bureaucrats, but not by the public at large. So this kind of expert who is not validated by the public is the expert who comes in a conflict with democracy. Now, government that fails to deliver on its promises may earn the contempt of its citizenry. This is not the same, though, as a check on science, right? If we know the juvenile justice system is failing, this is not the same as knowing who in the system is to blame, or which of its various professions with claims to expertise ought not to be regarded as expert. The public may get unhappy. It may find outlets for its dissatisfaction, but the bureaucrats themselves are not directly elected. You cannot sue them, right? And they do not appeal to the general public for legitimation means there's no direct relationship between their job performance and the claims of these experts and democracy. So we have experts who are members of groups whose expertise is generally acknowledged like doctors and physicists. We have experts whose personal expertise is tested and accepted by individuals such as the authors of self-help books. We have members of groups whose expertise is accepted only by particular groups like theologians, whose authority is only accepted by their sect. We have experts whose audience is the public, but who derive their support from subsidies or on parties interested in their opinions, and experts whose audience is bureaucrats with discretionary power. So experts in public administration. There's this classic paper that I was talking about on Friday on child abuse. Here you'd see the triumph of an expanded concept of child abuse. So with the initial dominant concept of child abuse in the 1960s, you can only find a few thousand examples of child abuse in the entire nation. But with this vastly expanded edition of child abuse, virtually everyone was raised with child abuse because child abuse came to be defined as anything that did not allow you to flourish. Did you have some things in your upbringing that were not encouraging of your flourishing? Then you, my friend, you suffered child abuse. This is the fifth type of expertise when you have certain professional groups who get to successfully impose their definitions and wield discretionary power. The reason child abuse is a problem is because social workers and physicians acting in the name of the state employ this concept, this vastly expanded concept of child abuse and operate in terms of a consensus about it, and they have the powers of the police state behind them. What about the expert whose racist biases are passed off as science, and that this becomes part of the culture through repetition? So the public is not merely a passive recipient of expertise and of science. The public plays a role in the legitimation of experts and science. So the hard road that Darwinism had to accept and should remind us that although it may be easy to get public acceptance for views that flatter the public, the public is not just a passive receptor. The legitimating done by the public may lag behind the legitimating done by the professional community for decades. The public is often not very adept at distinguishing the core of expert knowledge from the shadow, the penumbra. Penumbra refers to a shadow that is cast by the core. So in his book The Concept of the Political in 1932, Karl Schmidt said words such as state, republic, society, class, sovereignty, constitutional state, absolutism, dictatorship, economic planning, neutral state or total state, all these terms are incomprehensible if one does not know exactly who is affected, who is combated, who is refuted or who is negated by such terms, or to use the language of Stalin who whom, who is doing what to whom. And what does this have to do with expertise? Well, experts claim to affect combat, refute and negate groups all the time. So when scientists proclaim the truth of Darwinism, they refute negate and combat the Christian view of creation and thus Christians. When research is done on racial differences, it may well affect negate those who are negatively characterized. Some truths are too dangerous to even inquire into because simply by inquiring into the possibility of group differences, we might hurt the self-esteem of groups who have some failings. So when Robert Oppenheimer insisted on technical grounds that the H-bomb was unfeasible, his opinion desaivered, negated and combated the faction that supported the decision and favored the position of Edward Teller that the H-bomb was very much feasible. The claims about the human contribution to climate change favor the faction that believes in the extensive role of the state in regulating the economy. Now all of these claims are political, they are not neutral. This was feeling kind of sporty, also added $150 million or something called the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program because while we're feeding Ukraine, why not feed the rest of the world? We've got more food than we can use. And of course that will obviously include baby formula too because kids in other countries need to eat. Then there's another huge chunk of cash to quote, combat human trafficking. Now not combat human trafficking in Texas where it is now ubiquitous thanks to the open borders with Mexico, but to combat human trafficking in Ukraine because it's sad what's happening there. And the chat says I'm debating whether to continue watching this stream or Better Call Saul season six. I am honored simply to be in the running for competition for your attention right now when Better Call Saul season six is beckoning. Just to be nominated is a tremendous honor. Not here. That's not sad. We're ignoring it. There's still more money to make sure Ukrainians have emergency shelter because apparently more than a million Americans aren't homeless tonight. There's 900 million to make sure Ukrainians have access to quote entitlement programs or entitlement programs. They'll need them when they arrive here as many will. In other words, you can't afford to fill your truck, but you now get to pay the living expenses of anyone who shows up in your country claiming to be from Ukraine and you will. And then because paying off your friends is always the real point of these exercises in Washington, there are billions more dollars for Lloyd Austin's former employers in the weapons business. That would include $72 million for something to Bill describes as quote, research, development, test and evaluation in Ukraine. Now don't say bio labs because that's not allowed, but honestly this is weird. Ukraine is a war zone and therefore probably not a great place for scientific research right now, but whatever. We're funding some kind of science experiments in Ukraine. No more questions from you. And the bill goes on like this and on and on. As Congressman Thomas Massey has pointed out, Congress has now spent more money on Ukraine in six months than the U.S. government spent on all roads and all bridges in the United States over all of last year. Okay, I have a question for you guys. What do you do with a good friend who keeps asking you to do things that he is capable of doing for himself? So I have a good online friend who has contributed dozens of great ideas to the show, someone who's been a wonderful friend online for years, someone who is of good humor, someone who's enjoyable, someone who's polite and nice, but he keeps asking like a damsel in distress. So Michael Savage, for example, has blocked him. And so what did Michael Savage say on this particular tweet that was referenced by another Twitter? Could somebody please tell me? And I want to say to him, bro, incognito mode is your friend, right? With incognito mode, you get to see the tweets of people who've blocked you. There's no need to ask anyone for help. I mean, I think I probably fall on the other end of the spectrum. Like I think generally speaking, I probably don't ask for help when I should. But I'm just kind of gobsmacked by people who ask for help for things that they are perfectly capable of doing for themselves. And I hate subsidizing that. I hate encouraging, subsidizing, enabling this learned helplessness. Like we're talking about a grown ass man, 10 years younger than me, perfectly capable of using incognito mode to read tweets by people who've blocked him. What do you do? I've sometimes sent things to people who've requested particular writings and then I'll send them a PDF and they'll say, oh, I can't figure out how to open this PDF. Now I want to go, ah, I just did you a favor. I emailed you a PDF. If you can't open the PDF, that's on you. That's your problem. I grow up because it's just no end of the way that people just suck the life out of you to do things for them. They're perfectly capable of doing for yourself. I find it's absolutely essential to just put a stop to it right away saying, dude, don't you feel ashamed to ask someone else to do something that you are perfectly capable of doing for yourself? Aren't you ashamed that you haven't Googled this? Aren't you ashamed of like standing up, taking care of these things before asking for help from others? So how do you deal with this? Is it just not a big deal to you? Because I find in my experience, if you enable someone once, they will come back and ask you 15 more times. There's absolutely no end to the learned helplessness, damsel in distress. Oh, I just can't figure out this elementary aspect of technology. Could you just take care of this for me? So what do you do? Do you call it out? Do you put up with it? Do you subsidize it? Do you enable it? I'm asking for a friend. Yeah, figure it out for yourself. I don't understand it. To me, it's so shameful to ask for help for something that I am capable of doing myself. I can't even comprehend it. There's no shame in asking for help for things that one is not capable of doing for oneself, or something that might take one hours to figure out. By all means then ask for help, that elementary thing's the equivalent of Googling something. I don't understand someone who's not ashamed to voice that kind of imposition on others. And then you can say, oh, 40, I don't churn my milk. Yeah, but you don't ask your friends to churn your milk, right? If you don't toss your own salad, I suspect you don't invite your friends over to toss your salad. But maybe my life experience is different. The $40 million we're sending to Ukraine so they can secure their borders, by the way, is more than double, more than double what Joe Biden has asked to fund customs and border security in the United States. One bill, more than double what we're spending this year on our borders. And then in the middle of this historic drug emergency, and it is, the bill spends more than 10 times the entire budget of the DEA, more than 10 times, just in case you're wondering how your leaders feel about you. They're not fans at all. And now we know for sure. You should know that every single Democrat in the House of Representatives voted for this bill. That would include even Barbara Lee of Berkeley. Now, if you remember her name, it may be because in 2001, Barbara Lee of Berkeley was the only member of Congress to oppose the war against the Taliban. But a war in Ukraine is a war that Barbara Lee can support. Why? Because there's no potential chance that war could help the United States. Here's her reasoning. This war is not only about Ukraine. This war is about the rest of the world and Putin trying to establish autocratic governments throughout the world. And we know that this is taking place through disinformation campaigns, through all kinds of misinformation that's taking place. Oh, so it's not really about Ukraine. It's about something bigger than Ukraine. That's bizarre when people are willing to support foreign policy interventions so long as they are not of assistance to the United States. It's funding. Look, have you considered waiting into cozy TV? Is that not the kind of audience you want to cultivate? I have not thought one second about waiting into cozy TV. I don't have anything, you know, inherently against it as just it's never been a consideration. Then someone else suggested that I wait in on David Cole. Do you feel any parallels with David Cole Stein's relationship with Mel Gibson's father Hutton and your relationship with your father? Well, I didn't have a relationship with my father, but because I didn't really have a relationship with my father, I always had a thirst for father figures in my life. So probably David Cole Stein had something similar. He both had a thirst for father figures. Now, I chose like Dennis Prager. He was the father figure that I resonated with. He was fairly middle of the road, moderate, you know, common sense to call pretty menchy guy, a pretty good role model if you're in desperate need of a role model in a father figure as I was. So I mean Hutton Gibson, Mel Gibson's father was pretty eccentric guy with bizarre views on the Holocaust and who knows how many other bizarre views, but that relationship obviously met something in David Cole. I remember when I would talk to Kevin McDonald, that kind of resonated with me based on my childhood where my father was regarded as a heretic in much of the South Adventist church. And so I kind of liked about Kevin that he was widely regarded as a heretic. And I think David Cole Stein fancies himself a heretic, probably resonates with Mel Gibson's father's heretical status. And I think resonating with heretics is probably part of some antisocial tendencies where you view the conventional wisdom as inherently corrupt and oppressive. And you want a revolution, right? If you're not happy inside, you want a revolution to create a chaotic outside world that matches your inside world. The soccer cost and have a grand plan or a vision other than just throwing red meat to angry Americans. Well, I think he's a populace. And yes, I do think he has a vision. I think he would like immigration restriction and fair trade to bring more manufacturing back to America. So I think he has a vision that the average American is getting screwed over by our current system. David Cole is not a Holocaust tonight. Well, he was for decades. I mean, it was kind of a bizarre thing. You got this Jewish kid making all sorts of fact free proclamations about Auschwitz and other aspects of the Holocaust. Just, you know, bizarre stuff going on. Phil Dada Hue pandering to the worst and most ignorant sections of society. That was his thing for decades. And then when the blowback became intense enough, he dropped it. Let's get a little more hate point here from Tucker. Thanks, Barber Lee for being dim enough to tell us that to say it out loud. This is a war on disinformation, which at some point in some way is dead, certain to be a war on you. No question about it because you're a font of disinformation, meaning you disagree. But we know for certain that wars against things you can't really identify against people who don't exist. Wars against concepts. One thing we know about those wars, like the war on terror, is they last forever. So it's a little weird to see Tim Ryan of Ohio vote for this. Tim Ryan was supposed to be a working man's Democrat, a guy who cares about bread and butter issues. Tim Ryan represents Youngstown in Akron. Take a look at Akron sometime. It's like a war zone itself. These are the cities that built America crumbling and desperate now from total neglect. But don't you worry, Tim Ryan is totally committed to rebuilding Kyiv. And so is Nancy Pelosi. For Pelosi, funding Ukraine at any cost is more than a foreign policy objective. It's a kind of religious observance. The brutality of Putin is not just what he's doing in Ukraine, but the impact that it is having on food for the world. So when you're home thinking, what is this all about? Just think about when I was hungry, you fed me in the gospel of Matthew. Oh, so Jesus wants to send more missiles to Ukraine. And the more missiles we send to Ukraine, the less hungry people are going to be. Wait a second. Okay, back to this great Stephen Turner book, the Politics of Expertise. Now, aren't facts and themselves non-political? Well, no, Carl Schmidt says, what is political? Is itself a political question? Making something scientific or true? Does it make it non-political? The political versus non-political distinction is itself political. So above all, the character determines the use of the word political, regardless whether the adversary is designated as non-political, harmless, or vice versa. If one wants to disqualify or denounce him as political to portray oneself as non-political, as purely scientific, purely moral, purely juristic, purely aesthetic, purely economic, and thereby superior. So the political, non-political distinction is political. Typically comes in the form of a claim that something is non-political by virtue of being purely something else. So the political enemies of Protestantism were one of the sources of the modern notion of politics. They like to distinguish religion from politics, implicitly denigrating politics as compromising and hoarding themselves up as the higher category of religious. So political was the preferred term of censure deployed by Catholic leaders to besmirch all those who would abandon religious truth, seek accommodation with known heretics. And the chat says, David Cole says that Holocaust deniers he formerly associated with, like Fred Luchter, now consider him a sellout and a messiah agent. Well, David Cole did turn his back on his decades of Holocaust denial when it became just too uncomfortable to continue. Judah says, I'd rather listen to Tucker than to Fordy. Ouch. Okay. So what about scientists who believe the speech of other people should be suppressed, right? So many scientists and many of our elites believe that denying climate change should be regarded as socially unacceptable as denying the Holocaust. What about those who believe that those who advocate wrong ideas should swing from the lampposts? So scientists have often been compared to priests, right? They're supposed to possess some special truth that ought to be respected and believed. Some of them have behaved like priests, for example, by demanding that free speech about global warming should be suppressed if it does not fit with the scientific consensus. And free speech about COVID should be suppressed if it does not fit with the scientific consensus. So this notion of a benign relationship between expertise and democracy doesn't really hold up, right? Experts are as dangerous to democracy as the Catholic Church was during its aggressive phases in the 19th and early 20th century, right? The Taliban, the Mullahs in Iran are today threats for the same reason. Right now, scientists don't exercise the same power as the Mullahs in Iran, but many of them wish that they did. Okay. You want Tucker, you get Tucker. Wouldn't Jesus want to do everything possible to bring an end to the war in Ukraine? You're really just a little twit. How dare you quote that book? By the way, there was a time when Nancy Pelosi didn't want to spend billions of dollars to secure a country's border. She said it was wasteful and morally wrong. It wasn't that long ago, by the way, it was April of 2017. See if you notice the difference. She's forespending billions of borders now. She was opposed to it then. What changed? Watch. The wall is, in my view, immoral, expensive, unwise. And when the president says, well, I promised a wall during my campaign, I don't think he said he was going to pass a billions of dollars of cost of the wall onto the taxpayer. Oh, did you catch that? Border security in the United States is immoral. But Jesus is strongly for border security in Ukraine and abortion, by the way. It's a sacrament. As usual, Democrats, as ludicrous as this may sound, are united on this point. They stand as one. But also, as usual, a sustained propaganda campaign in the American media has managed to divide the Republican Party. Now, why does this happen every single time? Here's why. Because Republican office holders, no matter how conservative they tell you they are, believe the New York Times. They care deeply what legacy media say. They read the New York Times every day. They don't want to be criticized by the New York Times. And that's how the left controls them every single time. If you don't believe it, think back the last two years. You saw the same dynamic. Wait, every single time. Is that a shout out to the alt-right every single time meme? Okay, think about biologist Paul Ehrlich. His every expert prediction in policy relevant domains has been proven to be wrong by white margins. That's a point made leafily by his nemesis, the economist Julian Simon. So not only has Paul Ehrlich not been expelled from the community of biologists, he is treated as a noble martyr to the cause of truth merely for suffering the indignity of having his claims questioned by non biologists. So ostracism for experts is more likely to result from challenging conventional opinions in your expert community than from being wrong over and over and over again, but conforming with the community. And one of the best established findings of old fashion sociology of science is that making mistakes has virtually no career cost. It's also true for pundits or the pundits who supported the 2003 Iraq invasion. They haven't paid a price for that. Now professional communities are routinely wrong. The inductive hypothesis in the philosophy of science that our present scientific views can be expected to be proven wrong because our past scientific views have been proven wrong probably applies even more to expert opinions. Expert opinions seem to obey the pendulum laws of fashion more often than the laws of scientific progress. So you read an expert advice book from the early part of the last century. It's usually an exercise in the realm of the comic. You see the origins of the old wives tales believed by one's grandparents. Yet these are often based on data and reasoning as good or as better than the data and reasoning employed today. The skepticism about the truth of expert opinion is well warranted apart from questions of motive. One reason experts are so spectacularly wrong is precisely that the careers of experts tend to be bound up in a disciplining process that makes errors both inevitable and consensual by punishing those who don't go along with their community consensus. So experts typically make their reputations as real scientists, real economists or whatever. And they typically care for to say nothing that conflicts with the rules of the game in their particular field. So experts who speak for their field and who are also professional apostates are nonexistent. This is a role only for the orthodox. Now this does not mean that their pronouncements of public policy conform to the well-defined rules of the game. Far from a policy issues putting things like global warming are partly based on facts, partly based on uncertain claims, partly based on belief about human conduct and what is natural or not natural about whether a fluctuation based on complex and uncertain inferences from data and on guesses. So this is quite different from what is ordinarily understood as science. So consider an area in which expert claims have been made for decades and it variably turned out to be not only false but deleterious to the objects of the expertise, development economics. So should development economics just shut up for these development economists just shut up. They know some things but realistically they don't know how to produce vibrant economies in the third world. They don't know how to lead millions out of poverty under the actual political and cultural biological conditions of impoverished nations. Does that mean they should stop trying as experts to formulate policies? Probably not. Experts have no special expertise that would allow them to know when their knowledge is partial or inadequate for particular purposes. This is something they only learn by applying it. So this is perhaps a domain in which the urgency is such that trying on the basis of very limited understanding is the only option. Emergency is probably a reason biologists give Paul Ehrlich an ethical pass on his long list of false predictions. So what are we to do in the face of these expert claims, many of which are dubious? Where did we go to war in Iraq in 2003? There was no lack of discussion. C-SPAN ran all night sessions with the US Congress in which the issues were thoroughly aired. The public accepted the opinions of experts in an expert community that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. The experts were wrong despite presuming all the right cues despite establishing a consensus despite making themselves credible. So can the public be faulted for accepting their expertise? Why do we do with the experts, guys? C-SPAN in the early days of both the BLM riots and the COVID lockdowns. Nancy Pelosi was out there first taking the most extreme possible position and then a lot of Republican leaders agreed with her. Do you remember that? Two years ago this month, Nikki Haley, former governor of South Carolina, running for president, she's conservative, she told Americans in the first days of the riots that they deserved to suffer after George Floyd died. Quote, in order to heal it needs to be personal and painful for everyone, she wrote, and in the end it was personal and painful. A lot of people died and that was good because your racism killed George Floyd. That was Nikki Haley's first reaction. She read it in the New York Times and she believed that they all do. So it shouldn't shock you that Nikki Haley's first reaction to the Russia invasion and Mitch McConnell's first reaction too and the first reaction of so many other Republican leaders was that protecting Ukraine is way more important than protecting you than protecting America and Mitch McConnell hasn't, to his credit, moved from that. He still thinks it. Here he was yesterday. I think we all agree the most important thing going on in the world right now is the war in Ukraine. I had a chance to call the president last week and request that the Ukraine package move by itself and quickly. He said let me think it over. He called back in about 15 minutes and agreed that we need to do this Ukraine only and quickly. I think we're on the path to getting that done. You gotta hope that there's some sincere billionaire out there who's going to fund a primary challenge against every single one of those Republican senators standing behind Mitch McConnell, as he said, and we'll quote again. I think we all agree the most important thing going on in the world right now is the war in Ukraine. No. The most important thing going on in the world right now is the state of your country, the one you're supposed to run, the people you're supposed to represent, whose lives you're supposed to care about, the ones you can't buy food or gas. Okay, this is pretty good stuff here from Tucker Carlson, but I know you want me to get back to this Stephen Turner book, The Politics of Expertise. Experts often have opinions about public policy, but these opinions don't really have the authority of science in the sense intended. They're not part of a textbook scientific consensus. Nothing in textbook science or in economics is sufficient to settle any serious public policy question. It is knowledge, but it is knowledge that needs to be put together with other people's knowledge to add up to a rational and sound decision. So experts know the facts in the narrow sense may feel that they have a special qualification for pronouncing on things in gray areas, which relate to the facts in the narrow sense, but which are not properly the same sort of things. The long history of atomic scientists attempting to intervene in the weapons policies of their countries is an example of this. Yes, there's absolutely nothing about having the expertise to develop nuclear weapons. That means that you have more wisdom with regard to how nuclear weapons should be deployed. So what are some prudent alternatives to reliance on experts? So one is the market. What will people pay? Another model is families. The expert may act in a paternalistic way towards that which is theirs. Knowledge is in the hands of the expert, so is learning. And we have stakeholder models, representative democracy. So expert rule is a rival to representative democracy because you've got reliance on experts in a democracy that will subvert popular rule. That legislative policies and politics force representation and those that they represent to choose. No consensus is required, but voting produces decisions by compromise and horse trading. The horse is being interest and beliefs that are valued in the political market. Another alternative is self-regulating expert responsibility models. So NASA's decisions to launch a shuttle, the dropping of the A-bomb, emissions reviewing policy issues, producing white papers. So in the case of NASA, there are approximately 5,000 critical flight threatening issues in every launch. There's bureaucracy. This combines expertise with elaborate consensus, favoring career structures. And you've got different expert commissions in market-like atmosphere of conflicting expert claims. You've got artificially created public expert forums. These are legitimation devices. You've got mechanical aggregation procedures, such as guessing the number of beans in a jar. So this minimizes interest and interest related bias. You've got a deference to experts speaking as a community. So professional bodies such as physicians often produce collective advice, which relies on professional standards. We've got oracles by making answers come in a yes-no form. They force users to carefully construct and rationalize their questions. You've got parties as expert bodies, political parties. So learning is done in conformity with party doctrine and aspires to cohere with party values. Then there is science, which aggregates knowledge. Science publishes papers, awards grants, gives degrees, prizes. This is only indirectly related to truth, but scientists claim to speak for science as representatives. When scientists are forced to make decisions collectively and to produce a consensus artificially, then there is often trouble. So in relation to the consensus assertions of the intergovernmental panel on climate change. So at the end of the Enlightenment, right around the end of the 18th century, early 19th century, some of the more astute observers grasp with wonderful clarity that the equality between citizens and scientists was now an impossibility and that this had the effect of undermining the whole idea of democratic rule. And thinkers like Saint-Saman and Comte took this step further and then renounced the whole ideal of democracy in favor of expert rule. One of the great themes of Western thought is the contrast between science and other forms of knowing, believing, and thinking. What makes science special? So we've got historians, we've got philosophers, we've got pundits, have examined the contrast between science and common sense, between science and religion, between empirical science and speculative philosophy, between universally valid science and local truths of law, customer, social practice. So what is distinctive about scientific thinking and how is it distinctively better? How is it more sure? How is it more valued? Now, we don't really have any satisfactory answers. So such ideas as creation science show the confusion surrounding the question of the whole nature of science that many of the characterizations originally intended by philosophers who argued for the specialness of science have not held up. So these philosophers are aware that there are other forms of knowing that shared many of the cognitive aims of science such as consistency among relative beliefs. And so the philosophers were concerned about identifying what's the special ingredient that makes a belief scientific? Well, there is no special ingredient that makes a belief scientific. There are no successful results here. None of the supposed special ingredients of science stood up to scrutiny. There's a long history of criticism showing that the particular feature it uses, a basis for distinguishing science is not always characteristic of science or is frequently present in non-scientific forms of knowledge as well, although the contrast is not as sharp as it appears to be. Now in the 19th century, science was dominated by the refinement of measurement and observation, but you can have very refined measurement and observation that leads to racist results, right? What if different groups have different levels of IQ? So in the 19th century, the idea of empirical position and the elimination of uncertainty in prediction, that was the hallmark of science. And the important sciences of the day such as observational astronomy and race science were occupied with particular practical methodological problems that reflected a science's level of instrumentation. So the idea that observations should be neutral from observer to the observed was a highly important practical problem for 19th century astronomers. They learned that astronomical observations were not neutral, but varied among individual observers. So the 19th century scientists by and large, particularly the physicists, insisted that the laws of science were just purely descriptive and any notion of causation is a theological residue. Then we got quantum theory and quantum theory showed that the position observer was an integral part of the data. And now we become fascinated by the processes by which scientific concepts change. So change is now a permanent feature of science. But is it the special ingredient? Is this what is distinctive about science? Karl Popper developed the idea that science proceeds by making daring hypotheses, refuting them in the course of this learning to make better ones. Well, there are other modes of thinking that do the same. Now Thomas Kuhn came along with his 1962 famous book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. So he says scientific concepts change in abrupt fashion with contrasting frames of reference, alternative criteria of good science succeeding one another in traumatic ruptures or paradigm shifts, quite different from the routine replacement of bad results by good results. So the whole idea that the way scientific concepts change is unique to science has also proven to be illusory. The contrast between scientific knowledge and the kind of knowledge that goes into decision making by public officials making public policy is pretty similar. Whole ideal of objectivity, preference of basing as much as possible on observable facts, distinguishing between changes that are routine corrections and those that are sharp shifts between disparate frames of reference or to be found in decision making in public policy. So both science and decision making characterized by rationality, a self conscious reflection and analysis by the idea that results should stand up to public scrutiny and criticism. People odying on fentanyl, 107,000 in a year dead young people, Americans. But that's nothing compared to Ukraine. We all agree Ukraine is the most important thing. Really if you agree with that you should not be sitting in the United States Senate as a Republican and yet that's their position. Of course it's Lindsey Graham's position just to give you yet another example that if Putin's still standing after all this then the world's going to be a very dark place China's going to get the wrong signal and we'll have a mess on our hands in Europe for decades to come. So let's take out Putin by helping Ukraine. All right. So you're saying that that's how this ends that Putin is removed? Is there any way? There's no off rent. There is no off rent. No off rent. Let's take out Putin. It's weird to see a guy live out of his strange little fantasy life on TV live. Lindsey Graham won't come on this show. He's afraid we could spend the next hour playing. Okay. So Sid in the chat is all convinced that China's just going to blow everyone away. So a few years ago after I read Michael Beckley it became very clear to me that China wasn't a huge threat to the United States that China would be very lucky to even survive as an entity in the next 10 years. I expect that China will break up. So I think we're seeing now, you know, China going increasingly downhill, looking increasingly weak and incompetent. They can't even develop an effective vaccine. China's military is nowhere as tough as we thought. So remember there are all these alt-right memes that, you know, our military was gay, but the Russian and Chinese military as well, they were really manly and masculine and formidable. Well, it doesn't look that way. America is far, far, far, far more powerful than you imagine. And China and Russia are far, far, far more weak. This is George Friedman on American power. There is a tendency both by Americans and my foreigners to vastly underestimate American power. We also have to remember that Russia is a third world power or third world country. Its GDP ranks somewhat below South South Korea's. Its per capita GDP makes it 86th in the world. Not that of great power. It's a nice middle nation. So it's a very poor country. And it's advised by selling raw materials, like any third world country. Not advanced industrial goods or anything like that. Natural gas. So we begin with the fact that this is a country that blew the chance to become industrialized after the fall of the Soviet Union and basically is very poor, very tense. The Siberians of all people rise up constantly against the central government. It's not a peaceful government. And the capital of the country has not at all influenceable by the government. It's owned by oligarchs, massive oligarchs, who prefer to keep it outside the country, which makes it very hard to develop. So the Russians at reputation as a great power grew from what they were during the Cold War. Now, no, they're not. And we're thinking that. In the meantime, the underestimation of American power is always breathtaking. We're the largest economy in the world. We control two oceans. We have the largest navy, the most powerful air force, the space force. And in the United States, we love to tear ourselves down. Well, not one. All Americans hate the government, whichever is the president, somebody's second. He's stupid and a fool, right? Third, we are lost our history. We're great, but we've lost our greatness and no longer powerful. And we go through this It's our life. It's America. You just have to put two destroyers in the Indian Ocean and you would prevent China from getting the fuel it needs to survive. And within a couple of months, 500 million Chinese would be starving. You just need two two destroyers in the Indian Ocean to cut off China's importation of fuel, right? China has to import 90% plus of its gas, right? Just two destroyers in the Indian Ocean could cut that off. China's manufacturing would rapidly come to a halt. The country couldn't feed itself. Hundreds and hundreds of millions of Chinese would starve. And it takes two destroyers to take down China. China is truly a paper tiger. China is falling apart before our eyes. Unfortunately, Sid can't see it. The carriers are useless against hypersonics. Don't even need an aircraft carrier, bro. You just need a couple of little destroyers to take down tankers and China would be absolutely finished. All right, back to Steven Turner, the politics of expertise. Okay, think about terms like facts, objectivity, public rationality, right? Each of these terms is a shadowy history of dispute similar to those of the special ingredients that are supposed to distinguish science. The idea of the public character of science, right? The public vindicate scientific results by replicating experiments or repeating observations. This public turns out to be a very small group of competent specialists who share the ideas, experiences, values and personal relations. So the group of people competent to discuss public policy decisions, probably equally limited share the same training and experience. So in public policy disputes, the issues are not usually factual or only factual, but they tend to be matters of conflict between groups that have different interests and different values. Scientists form communities with their own interests. Scientific disputes usually reflect differences corresponding to social differences among scientists, differences in background and institutional affiliation or the sources of funds for research. Any policy issues are not about values or purposes, but are primarily about the facts, but the facts themselves are in dispute. The philosopher Bertrand Russell writing in the wake of the Einstein revolution in physics had a phrase, the technique of the suspended judgment. This is supposed to embody science. This is supposed to be the basic element of decision making and of science. So physicists living through relativity theory, they had a transformation in the basic understanding of the universe and relativity theory was something they first had to make sense of as a hypothesis, then they had to explore while suspending judgment on the question of its ultimate validity. And once they had applied the hypothesis to problems in physics, come to see the power of relativity theory as a way of thinking, then they could accept it as true and teach it to the next generation of physicists as a given. All right, looking at this terrific book by Stephen Turner, The Politics of Expertise. A little bit more here from George Friedman. All right, it's like a Jewish mother. She doesn't leave me alone. Okay, but in the midst of that, Putin lost the point. He saw unrest in America, and he assumed it was like with unrest would be in Russia. It meant very different things. In effect, our military, our capital structure, anything else. It was just a party referring. And so he did not understand what power the US could bring to bear. One of it was NATO. We unified NATO. He's facing NATO now. And the other, the dollar crushed him. A dollar is the currency of international trade. You can't get any of me, any, you don't get to play. And so his problem is the least of his problems you've claimed. His problem is that he's been hit staggering blow after staggering blow by the United States who has a massive coalition. Interestingly, just the Chinese reached out to Canadians today with a suggestion. Why do we take George Friedman's gospel? We don't take George Friedman's gospel. Why are the Chinese running so scared right now? George Friedman's gospel only to the extent that he reflects some basic truths about the world around us. So why are the Chinese in such desperate shape right now? Question that Canada and China should cooperate greatly. And it's very important that we understand on Taiwan all the things they want to hear. They're not going to come to the Americans to say that, to come to the Canadians. So they reached out. Well, they made it the worst bet in human history. They bet that they could have an alliance with Russia that would counterbalance the United States. They misread Russia. They didn't know, I think that Putin was going to go into this war. And now they're sitting there and they've just had a lesson in what American sanctions look like. Okay, that tutorial is delivered and they're reaching out through the Canadians. Oh, they're two ways to look. First, any war costs. This is an economic war and it's going to cost us. It's going to cost us inflation, things like that. The job of the president at this point is to explain why these sacrifices are necessary. There's no war without sacrifice. Yeah, that's got a little Ken Woods here. Ken Brown. In the past week, and I want to, I don't know what this is called, Liars of the Right, Jayden McNeil. You know, I'm going to reserve that title. We're not going to use that because, you know, when I do a Liars on the right, we know it's a big block, but okay, not everyone is a hit, but it's kind of like a mission impossible or need for speed. It's a series. We're going to respect that every, every time I try to, I try to shoot higher, you know, I try to shoot higher. I try not to punch down, I guess, and trying to increase, you know, Mould Budd was on Tucker Carlson, right? You know, so we're always trying to punch higher with this. And so we're not going to do a Liars on the right Jayden McNeil or something like that, but I think I'm going to entitle this something like, you know, America first 2.0. And that is in reference to white nationalism 2.0, which is this concept of rebranding, this concept that well in the past, people had the right ideas, but it wasn't the right tone, or we didn't have the right leadership, or wasn't appealing to the right demographic, or it wasn't in the right style, or it didn't have the right branding, you know, all of these little tweaks, and it's like, it's the same essential courts, the same essential substance, but we just have to change the cast of characters, and we have to change the, you know, throw in some French words of, whoa, we have to change the, the niche, we have to change, you know, all of the window dressings, right? We have to change the optics. That is who Nick Fuente says, right? He came and he said, yeah, no, we can't be, we can't be racial nationalists. We have to become identitarians, guys. And basically, you know, we like the dissident, right? But we have to change the optics. We have to change the presentation. It's still about white people. It's still about, you know, anti-feminism, and anti-gay, and anti all of these groups, anti-black, anti-Jewish. It's all the same stuff that the alt-right was, but it's repackaged as we love Donald Trump, and, you know, we're in cells, and we're gamers, and so it was taking elements that already existed, and it was rebranding it, right? In the same way that, you know, Coke and Pepsi, they both sell sugary soft drinks, but they have a different brand. People associate them with different advertising, and some people are, I mean, sports teams are a great example, right? You know, you have the Cowboys and the Hawks and all these different, I don't know, I don't watch sports, but people get really loyal to their team, and all the team members are just sort of interchangeable. You know, it's not even like they grew up in the same place, you know, they pick from, I think Tom Brady's from California or something, or Montana, I don't know. These players are from Puerto Rico. These players are from wherever the heck they are, and they're assembled into this group, into this cast of characters, and people become loyal to it. And it's, you know, it's a silly thing, but it's what human beings do. So I can't really fault the audiences. Audiences will always do this, fans will always do this. And, you know, this is a perennial thing. And so what we're seeing is, you know, you had, and I've done a video, I did a video five years ago, if you can believe that, on the nine stages of white nationalism. And at that time, I predicted that, you know, and this was in 2017, I said, you know, Donald Trump is going to kind of determine the future of this thing, which direction it goes in. Is he going to go more in the America First direction, or is he going to go further from that direction? There was kind of this fork in the road at the time. And I think what we've seen is America First totally won, totally blew out. I didn't actually see QAnon becoming the phenomenon that it did, because at that time, QAnon was still part of the alt-right big tent. And then it kind of branched off and became its own thing. And that I think has been part of the America First phenomenon, because, you know, Marjorie Taylor Greene, all these people, Wendy Rogers, they're all part of that QAnon, which is itself an echo of the Tea Party movement, just rebranded for the internet age. Like the boomers have finally learned how to use the internet. That's what QAnon is. It's also a heavily Gen X phenomenon as well, not just boomers. So America First has had this resounding victory post-2017 for the last five years. And it's basically reached its peak. It's reached its zenith. And in the same way that people looked at the alt-right in 2017, they said, we've reached our peak with Charlottesville. We've reached our zenith. It's time for a scapegoat. We need a scapegoat to burn an effigy. We need a human sacrifice so that we can have a new movement. And at the time, everyone piled on Richard and said he's responsible for all the problems when he was just symptomatic of, you know, there was nothing really special. There was nothing especially egregious about what he was doing relative to his followers or his fans. He wasn't really any better or worse. But they burned him as a human effigy so that, you know, there could be this change. They could have this ideological sleight of hand where it's a new movement now. In reality, you know, a lot of it is the same. It's the same sort of dissident right thing. And I think I'm glad that term has entered into the parlance because when I do remake that video, which is basically going to have to be a documentary or a book at some point, you know, if I could get the gumption together to be a disciplined four hours while working a full-time job to do that. But it would be called a history that isn't right. And it would have at least nine or probably now 11 different phases accelerating with the internet age. And so the same thing that happened to Richard where it's like, okay, the alt-right everyone could sense that it was peaking. It was declining. And so everyone dog piled on the supposed leader in order to create this. It's a, you know, Gerard, Rene Gerard describes this phenomenon. It's an ancient human pagan right that you kill the leader essentially, you know, you kill Cronus, you kill the giant, you kill whoever is considered to be the father figure of that time so that some new son figure can take his place. And that was Nick. And now Nick has had five, he's had a five-year run, if you can believe it, since 2017, up until the current year 2022. He's had five years to build his movement, in the same way that Richard started his thing, I guess back in 2012, Taki Maag or whatever it was. And he had, you know, maybe he was even short of three years or something. But Nick has basically peaked out. He has created all the alliances and all the networks that they ever will. He's losing, he's losing his network. He's losing his key connections. He's losing his momentum that everyone can feel. And they're like jackals. Jaden McNeil is like a jackal. And I'm not saying that I'm a jackal, you know. I see it in the news. I say, okay, I put out a video, maybe it'll get a thousand views, couple new subscribers, whatever. I don't really care. Like I don't have any special animus on a personal level toward any of these people. I hate all their ideas. And I think all their ideas are trash. But I don't have any animus against them personally. I don't prefer really one or the other. In fact, if I was to say, I mean, look, I have no loyalty to America as a nationalist concept. I mean, I guess I have a, I have a loyalty to the laws of the land, I suppose. But you know, I'm not an American, I'm not part of the patriot movement. I'm not part of a nationalist movement. I'm not part of the right wing. I'm not part of the dissident right. But if I was, you know, I would recognize that right now Nick is Wow, why would someone not identify with his own nation? Why would someone not identify with his own people? That's all that nationalism means. They have a particularly, you know, strong preference for your own, your extended family. It's the leader of that thing, essentially. And, you know, if I really wanted it to be successful, I would realize this perpetual cycle of continually, you know, first it's, you know, if you go back before Richard at one point, he was like Don Black and David Duke and Tom Metzger. And you know, you go before them and there was a whole another cast of characters. And you know, every generation has this thing, the internet is speeding up this process of, you know, you narcissistically, codependently puff up this leader. And then whenever there's a bump in the road, the jackals come out and there's a feeding frenzy and all these parasites and all of these personalities who are only really loyal when the loyalty is good. It's like a woman, it's like a military wife, you know, you get married and oh, I'll be here when you come home and you come home and she's off with some other guy. Because people are like, it's not just women. A lot of these people are anti-feminist. They think only women are like that. No, men are clearly this way that men prefer the strong horse. Men smell weakness. And when you're weak, and when you're down and out, and when you're kind of in a tough spot, men will just abandon you. People will just say, oh, I always hated you. It was your fault and you, you know, you made me divorce you. And you know, it's not a woman thing. It's everybody does this. This is a human trait that we will abandon leadership. We'll throw leaders under the bus when there's temporary setbacks and slowdowns. And so that's what's going on. Now that doesn't, you know, I made the arguments about the Fed thing. I just say that once, I'm not really going to run through that again. And look, you can never be 100% certain about it. I guess I would say I'm more certain about it than I have been about anyone else. But you know, I'm going to put that aside for a moment. Yeah, that's Ken Brown trying to make the case that Nick Fuentes is a Fed and say, you know, whatever the status of the four, like even Milo, who's a conform confidential informant. Milo Yiannopoulos is nominally right wing. He's probably, he probably likes Peter Thiel. He likes Donald Trump. He likes Elon Musk. Like, like he probably wants to accomplish goals in America. I don't think he's like working for the Democrat Party. See, people think that if you're, Hal Turner was a federal informant, and I think he still legitimately had like racist views, you know, just because you're a federal informant doesn't mean that you, that you have left wing views or something. And people don't really understand how that role works. And the psychology of those people who are federal informants is just like, yeah, I'm right wing, and I'm going to snitch on my enemies. But I can still achieve all my goals and still, you know, talk to the feds. That's entirely, that's entirely possible. Anyway, not to make this about the psychology of federal informants. But people oversimplify the issue. I mean, for me, it's, rather than trying to figure out the mind of people, you just got to look at the behavior. It's like, if you support January 6th, then you know, you are de facto a patsy at that point. But yeah, to talk about America first 2.0, what's going to happen after Nick, I don't think Nick is going to go, he's not going to die, like he's still going to be around. And he could have a renaissance. He could have a second chance. He could come back from this. But there's a theory, there's this American populist union with, you know, and there are a lot of people hate Nick. So it's like the anti-Nick coalition. So it's like Jaden McNeil and Scott Greer and Patrick Casey and the dude from Texas. And all these people get together and they say, we're going to do America first, but we're going to call it American populism. And we're going to, we're going to remake it. And it's not going to have this meanie guy, this meanie Nick Fuentes. He's so mean to us. So we're going to start our own movement. And it's going to be, again, an optics rebrand, you know, instead of making jokes about Hitler and cookie jokes, we're going to, we're going to be more moderate in that respect. We're going to be more optical. We're not going to call ourselves incels. So again, this is the same exact, you know, you, you live by the sword, you die by the sword. You, you were born in an optics war where you criticize the current leader of the distant, right? For being too unoptical because he said, hail Trump. I guess that's like, you know, the end of the world. And then you go and say, I'm Hitler two, three and four. Okay. Wow. How the tables have turned, right? But this is like the typical cycle of these little, you know, I mean, it's increasingly appealing to the mentality of an immature teenage boy, an angsty, resentful, anti-authoritarian teenage boy who hates the establishment. He hates, you know, the trusted experts. And so he wants to join one of these movements and that fuels the character of the movement and that influences the leaders of the movement. And so Nick Fuentes has been eaten up by the very forces that propelled him to prominence. And so yeah, I think these people will, well, I mean, I think, you know, Scott Greer has been on Tucker Carlson. A lot of these people seem to be, and one thing I'll say about this that's very interesting, a friend told me, he gave me very good advice. And I want to always remember, this is one of those ones I want to put in my book of quotes. He said to me, he said, you have to decide if you want a friend-friend relationship, or if you want an employee-employer relationship, because those are two very different things. And I think that advice is applicable to this situation. As far as- Yeah, you never hear Nick Fuentes or Richard Spencer talking about friendship. They don't seem to have friends. He seemed to only have followers. And so friends kind of mediate the individual and reality. Friends let you know when your fly is down. Friends make life 10 times more enjoyable and not really as painful when you have someone to share it with. But you notice from Nick and from Richard and from people like that, many of the e-personalities, they didn't seem to have friends. They only seem to have followers because in the online world, they can construct their own reality. They can block people that they don't like. They can live in some grandiose fantasy world as much as possible. Reality is much more painful. Developing and maintaining friendships takes work. It can come with some very painful challenges. And yeah, one thing I noticed about many of the more prominent e-personalities is that they don't seem to have any friends. And they don't seem to be actually interested in having friends. They only want to have followers. As far as I know, Jayden McNeill did very good work for Charlie Kirk. He did great work for Charlie Kirk doing this campus organization thing. Jayden McNeill seems to be this guy that you plug him in to an existing organization with existing funding and established thing. And he does very well in that environment. He's a very good kind of yes man. He works well in the bureaucratic kind of corporate structure as a kid. Great. You know, he works well with his fellow college kids. And that's awesome. I mean, in the abstract sense, not that I think Charlie Kirk is awesome, but like, you know, clearly he has some kind of organizational abilities. But you have to think of America First as a startup company, which is under extreme pressure. And you can't, you know, those skills don't just transfer automatically. And so, you know, it's like taking someone who works very well at Walmart and then expecting them to work well in a tech startup. It just takes two very different kinds of people. And so Jayden I don't think has what it takes to work within America First. And I don't think he performed. And I don't think he did anything very well. I think he was Nick's friend. And so what Nick really was looking for in Jayden and what he wanted in Jayden was a friend. And for a while he got a friend. And I guess, you know, for on a human level, they enjoyed each other's friendship. But the truth is that Nick and Jayden never had an employee-employee relationship. And Nick, I think, made a crucial mistake in making him the treasurer of his foundation, the America First foundation. Like he's your friend. You don't make him the treasurer of your foundation. That's not how these things work. Nick exercised extreme nepotism, hiring people because he liked them personally, not because they were actually good at anything. And the criticism about the gaming stream stuff is legitimate. Like, if he's going to be a gaming, like you have, at some point, you have to recognize that if you want to be someone's boss, you're going to lose that friendship because the two are mutually exclusive. You can't be someone's boss and someone's friend. You can do it for a time. But as things change, as things get disruptive, as you go through the good times and the bad times, the bad times are either going to break the friendship or they're going to break the employee-employee relationship. And oftentimes it's both. So don't employ your friends, especially if you're in some kind of a dissident, you know, federal informant, infested kind of semi... Okay, I have a considerable experience with being friends with a boss. Not having friends who employed me. I haven't had that experience very much. But I've had experience of working for someone who has become a friend. So I don't think it's unusual. I've gone to work for complete strangers. Then over the course of months or years, we've become friends. And the friendship boss divide hasn't been a problem in my experience, because I accepted in the workplace that what they wanted, their priorities, were my priorities. And so I accepted their dominion in the workplace. And therefore it wasn't a problem. Anti-government dissident organization. Don't employ your friends. Employ dudes who you're scouting talent, you're finding people and you're like, okay, I'm going to have these people work for me. They're going to be streamers. They're going to bring people to the platform, an audience, whatever you want to do, make money off of it. Great. But don't nepotistically bring in your friends. Keep your friendships separate from these other things. And so that was a mistake that Nick made. And I think he's learning from that mistake and maybe he'll have some kind of a comeback in the future. I mean, I guess you look at... Oh, what Ken's missing here is that there doesn't seem to be any evidence that Nick has friends. And if Jaden was his friend, that's kind of a weird one-dimensional friendship. They had a very, very little face-to-face interpersonal interaction. It was almost all virtual, even though they lived in the same building. The career of David Duke, and he was hate-mongering back in the 60s, and then he even ran his senatorial campaign like in the last five years. So he had a long career of white nationalism. I mean, my first video on this was all about how Nick is going to be 80 years old still doing the same shtick, just like Tom Esker, just like David Duke, just like all the people. That's just his personality. He's tenacious. He's not going to go away. I didn't make my video the fall of America First. In fact, I said, it's going to go on for another 60 years. That's my prediction. People who are predicting this is the end of America First. No, this is a schism event. This is you're going to have the America First 2.0, American Populous Union with all these people who are, they are who they are. They're somewhat different from Nick. They basically believe all the same things. They want different optics. They don't like him personally because he's a big meanie. People said this. It's funny. People say this about Richard. It's like Richard breaks up with everybody. Richard doesn't have it. I think actually this phrase keeps getting thrown around, kicked out of 109 friendships, which is this kind of anti-Semitic sort of joke. But the point is like, oh, if everybody's breaking up with this guy, all of his friends are betraying him, there must be something wrong with him. And the truth is that's not how it works. How it works is when you're seen as a leader and things go south, everyone starts betraying you. That's how it works because a lot of these friendships are based on the fact that you seem attractive and that we have to understand that. So there are people like Dennis Prager, for example, who says he's never lost a friend. So no, I don't think Ken Brown is right. There are plenty of people who've not experienced being betrayed, who have not lost friends. There was considerable things that Nick and Richard did that precipitated these breakdowns. Richard and Nick appear, and I don't know the personally, but just judging on their public personas, they appeared to lose touch with reality and to speak and act in a way that was anti-social and that created great trouble for people who were close to them, who were considerably damaged by their poor choices. Okay, what about a world without Vladimir Putin? What would that look like? I have one person here coming to you from an exciting hotel room near the Des Moines airport. On my way back on the war path here, going out to see some people and speak to groups, I wanted to take today as an opportunity to discuss what's going on with Russia as regards a possible coup or secession. There have been a lot of folks, especially the European Union, who are now actively, publicly calling for the Russian oligarchs to overthrow the Putin government, and I thought it was worth picking that apart. There are two groups of oligarchs. The first are the ones who got their assets by robbing the state blind in the 1990s in the post-Soviet collapse. This group includes folks like Peter Avon and Mikhail Friedman of Alpha Bank. This includes Michael Progeroff of Norils Nikol, which is the world's largest nickel, platinum, palladium, and copper deposit. It's like 40 percent of the world's palladium comes from there. These folks have minimal influence over the Putin government. They can't demand a meeting. They don't have access to the guy. Whatever he calls, they come running because they cut a deal with Putin back in 2000, right when he became president. Putin said that you can keep your assets as long as you pay your taxes, start paying your taxes, and you never get involved in politics. And that deal has more or less stuck for the next 22 years. So these folks do have a few assets outside of Russia, and these are largely what the governments of the West have been going around confiscating and threatening to expropriate. And it's not that I feel bad for these guys. I mean, they've got their stuff by stealing the state blind. But they are not ones who have the influence that would not be necessary to make a coup. They're widely disliked, not just by Putin, but by the entire Russian population. And if Putin wanted to get a few more points in popularity, executing a couple of these guys would probably do it for them, and they know it. So they are not the kind of group that you can really turn to for any sort of political change. The second group of oligarchs are the ones who became rich because of Putin. Putin brought them in. Either they were former KGB members or folks from his inner circle, whatever it happened to be. This includes folks like Sergey Chemisov, who is the world's most sanctioned person. He's in charge of the military industrial complex of Russia. And whenever you see equipment breaking down in the field, that's his fault because he is breathlessly corrupt. And Alexei Miller of Russia's Gazprom, which is the world's largest natural gas concern. These guys have access to Putin, and some of them, like Chemisov, are actually in the inner circle, but they are blindly loyal. Everything they have is because of their position next to Putin. And if he were to fall, they would probably fall, too. There's one exception. There's a guy by the name of Igor Sechin, who's in charge of Rosneft, which is the state oil company of Russia. He used to be a gun runner during the Cold War, and he's got the guts and he's got the means and he's got the access. If anyone in the inner circle or anyone of the elite is going to off Putin, it's going to be him. But if there's one thing that the rest of the elite, whether in the inner circle or out, agrees upon, it's that Sechin is kind of jackass, and they would probably pool to their strengths to off him the next day after he got rid of Putin. So I don't see a palace coup being very likely or a coup from within the inner circle or the oligarchs in general. This is just something that's going to have to go by the moral fashion method, which is wait for the state to collapse. In Russia, the Tsars, the leaders, whoever they happen to be, they're stable until they're not. And right now, the lights are still on, the trains are still running, and the wheat is still coming in. So while there are a lot of Russians who are embarrassed or angry with certain aspects of the war, we are nowhere near the critical mass that is necessary to generate any sort of meaningful revolt. So far, less than 1% of the Russian population has participated in protests, and those are pretty much over already. So if the Russian government's going to change, it's not going to be via the inspector, at least not now. I'd like to give a shout out at the end of this one to two things. First of all, to my nephew Ian in South Korea, hey, Petty, how you doing? For everyone who doesn't think that I am his uncle, okay, I think that won't do it for tonight.